Keith E. Mellinger

Keith E. Mellinger, Associate Professor of Mathematics and Chair of the Department of Mathematics, earned a Ph.D. (2001) and M.S. (1997) in mathematics from the University of Delaware, after receiving a B.S. (1995) in mathematics from Millersville University (Pennsylvania). He also had a VIGRE (Vertical Integration of Research and Education) post-doctoral position at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The recipient of many internal grants and a Jepson Fellowship from the University of Mary Washington, Dr. Mellinger is a Project NExT fellow through the Mathematical Association of America, and he and colleague Debra Hydorn received a grant to host the Central Virginia Regional Conference for Undergraduate Research in the Mathematical Sciences in 2005. In 2006, he was awarded a young investigator grant from the National Security Agency for his research in finite geometry and coding theory. Most recently, Dr. Mellinger was awarded a 2011-2012 Mary Washington Faculty Development Grant for the project “Cap partitions of affine spaces.”

In 2010, Dr. Mellinger and a Virginia Tech colleague received the Carl B. Allendoerfer Award at the Mathematical Association of America annual meeting. The award honored Dr. Mellinger for the article “Kirkman’s Schoolgirls Wearing Hats and Walking Through Fields of Numbers.” In 2008, he was recognized with the UMW Alumni Association Outstanding Young Faculty Member Award.

Dr. Mellinger has delivered professional presentations throughout the country and in Greece, Italy, and Canada. Most recently, he spoke on “Classes of permutation arrays in finite projective spaces” at the International Conference on Designs, Codes and Geometrics in Lewes, Del. He has published many articles on both mathematical research and pedagogy in a variety of professional journals. Recent publications include the papers, “Classes of Permutation Arrays in Finite Projective Spaces” in the International Journal of Information and Coding Theory (2010), “On the Number of k-gons in Finite Projective Planes” in Note di Matematica (2010), “2-dimensional optical orthogonal codes from Singer groups” in Discrete Applied Mathematics (2009), and “Spreads, Arcs, and Multiple Wavelength Codes” in Discrete Mathematics (2011). In addition, an article he co-authored with UMW undergraduate students titled “LDPC codes arising from hyperovals” appeared in the Bulletin of the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications.

Dr. Mellinger has served as referee for several research journals and is a brief/script reviewer and mathematical content consultant for the PBS show CyperChase. He is a member of the American Mathematical Society, the Mathematical Association of America, and the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications.